MMQB: Kudos to the Saints and Sean Payton

this is a discussion within the Saints Community Forum; Kudos to the Saints and Sean Payton
When the Saints gathered for training camp last Wednesday in the remote town of White Sulphur Springs, W.V., they expected to leave the first meeting of camp with coach Sean Payton and go ...

When the Saints gathered for training camp last Wednesday in the remote town of White Sulphur Springs, W.V., they expected to leave the first meeting of camp with coach Sean Payton and go straight to the annual conditioning test that kicks off each camp. Instead, Payton stood in front of his 90 men and said this day would be used for something different. He said they were going to rehab and refurbish two local homes and a large public park. The properties had been ravaged (1,200 homes had been destroyed or badly damaged) in the late-June flooding in and around the town where the Saints train. Payton told the team this was the most important thing they could do.

And so approximately 120 players and coaches and staffers got to work for three to four hours. Teams of 15 or so rookies went to either house and cleaned up the devastation and, directed by construction experts, built the homes back up. Most of the veterans went to the park, clearing rocks, rebuilding play areas for children, repainting dugouts on the baseball field and wheel-barrowing mountains of mulch to play areas. Drew Brees painted the merry-go-round, among other tasks.

“[Tackle] Zach Strief said it best: If there’s any team that can empathize with a devastated community, it’s the New Orleans Saints,” punter Thomas Morstead said from West Virginia on Sunday. “At our meeting that night, Coach Payton put up before-and-after pictures of the places we worked, and it was amazing how much got done. He compared it to training camp. Sometimes it’s so daunting to look at a big task at the start of training camp, all the things we need to get done in a short time at camp. But it gets done, and you feel great when you’re finished with it. Same thing here—it was a great thing to do, and for us, a great way to start training camp.”